OMNI
US CORPORATIONS NEWSLETTER #10, JUNE 7, 2020.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of
Peace and Justice.
(#1 August 7, 2008; #2 Feb. 11, 2010; #3 July
21, 2011; #4 Oct. 9, 2011; #5 Nov. 1, 2011; #6 May 5, 2012; #7 June 11, 2012;
#8 Dec. 12, 2012; #9 May 5, 2013).
Newsletters on
US Corporations complement those on US Capitalism, which tend to emphasize
financial institutions and the economic system as a whole.
"...if
way to the Better there be,
it exacts a full look at the Worst."
—Thomas Hardy
it exacts a full look at the Worst."
—Thomas Hardy
"I
refuse to live in a country like this, and I'm not leaving"
Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Danes claim
truly about their country where “few have too much and fewer still too
little.” There are many
capitalisms. US elites chose to make a
land where a few have too much, and too many have too little. –Dick
Speaking Truth to Power
 |
My blog: War and Warming
My Newsletters:
Index:
See: US
Capitalism, Citizens United and
McCutcheon v. FEC, Corporate Crime, Corporate Personhood, Globalization,
Military Industrial Complex, Occupy, Surveillance, and related newsletters.
Nos. 6-9 Contents at end.
Contents: Corporations
USA Newsletter #10, 6-4-20 (Miscellaneous reports, complaints, exposés,
including a few books, all published between 2014 and 2020)
US CORPORATE
STATE v. THE PEOPLE
Dick, Merchandise Built to Thwart Home-Repair
Neil Young’s New Album on GMOs
Fracking at Vernal, Utah
Michael
Klare, The Race for What’s Left
Tim Wu, Corporate Control
of the Internet
Robert Borosage, Congress Gives Tax Breaks
ALEC Again, in the Cities Now
Close Tax Loopholes
Control CEO Pay
Monbiot, Trans-Pacific Partners TPP
Chris
Hedges, Rise Up and Die, US
Capitalist
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Nader, Financial Titans Again Seek Total Control
Thomas,
Poverty and Corporate Control of Education
Munoz, Supreme Court Protects Corporate Immunity in
American Express v. Italian Colors
McGarity, Freedom
to Harm
Cartoon: Blame the Government
Anti-Public Corporate Campaign to Remove Regulations
Revkin, Causes of CO2/Global Warming Climate Crisis
Upton, Corporate Lying Exceeds Chicanery
John Montgomery, The
Benefit Corporation, Making Corporations Serve People and the Planet
Ralph Nader, Left and Right Coalescing to Counter
Corporations
Hightower, Disclosure Movement Wants to End Secret
Campaign Financing
Broad and Abrams, The People vs. Fossil Fuel
Companies—Some Victories
Anti-Trust
GAP
Resistance to the Corporate State
CORPORATE GREED
CORPORATE PRODUCTS VS. THE PEOPLE’S RIGHT TO REPAIR by Dick Bennett 7-16-15
Harper’s
Magazine (Mya Frazier, “Annotation: A Camera on
Every Cop,” August 2015) reports how police misconduct has led to enormous
profits for corporations making stun guns and cameras, particularly Taser
International, which advertises spectacular successes of its products, even
though “having a camera on doesn’t ensure a just outcome,” and contrary to the
advertising “may not even save money over the long run.” Nothing new here in the profit economy, though
plenty to keep conscientious state attorneys general busy sending consumer
warnings to police departments.
But some
manufacturers are pushing profits injurious to consumers in a new way; I refer
to the construction of products with “proprietary” parts that make
self-maintenance or assistance from fixit-shops more difficult. A few years ago
products were accompanied by instructions for self-repair or for the community
fix-it business. Now increasingly the
consumer must return a purchase to the maker for repair or trade-in replacement,
or must trash the product and purchase new.
The scam is the
subject of an article in In These Times (Kendra
Pierre-Louis, “Fight for the Right to Fix It,” August 2015). Not only are
products being produced with parts that make home or local repair difficult to
impossible, the practice is deliberate, according Gay Gordon-Byrne, director of
the Digital Right to Repair Coalition. In
complete disregard of the public, “Many items are unfixable by design,” when products
can and should be constructed repairable and with all the support necessary to
enable the repairs (help desk, manuals, parts).
And the problem transcends consumer rights. The present corporate profit possessiveness results
not only in higher repair costs, but reduces jobs and causes more toxic waste.
Talk to your
legislators, your attorney general, your city attorney. This is surely a free
market situation if there ever was one, a market for the people and the small
businessman provided by affirmative government.
We need legislation requiring manufacturers to provide service
information, security updates, and replacements parts. Tell them about the Massachusetts auto repair
bill requiring standardized repair data.
Write to newspapers to expose and shame acquisitive corporate bullies. And back up letters and talk with boycotts of
companies that fail to enable us to live less expensively. Individual
consumers should have the right and the possibility of repairing their
possessions, or having them repaired locally.
Need more help? Read these two
articles. Contact
rightorepair.org, digitalrighttorepair.org, Motor Vehicle
Owners' Right to Repair Act, iFixit for
free repair guides and more.
the Monsanto Years Reprise
REVIEW
of Neil Young and Promise of the
Real
BY JON DOLAN,
June
16, 2015, ROLLING STONE (July 2,
2015)
Young's new
album is a quick-and-dirty broadside against GMOs and corporations
Neil Young
has been sounding the alarm about environmental issues for more than four
decades. He warned us to "look at Mother Nature on the run" in
"After the Gold Rush," way back in 1970, a few months after the first
Earth Day. He's stayed on message through records like 2003's Greendale, on
which he pleaded, "We got to save Mother Earth," and 2009's Fork
in the Road, an ad for his alternative-power LincVolt car. But he's rarely
driven his point home as vehemently as on The Monsanto Years, a
jeremiad against the agrochemical behemoth of the title and what he sees as
American farming's Frankenstein future. "From the fields of Nebraska/To
the banks of the Ohio/Farmers won't be free to grow/What they want to
grow," Young sings at one point. If the imagery evokes Woody Guthrie, the
righteous rock & roll fire is pure Neil. From The Archives Issue
1238: July 2, 2015
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/neil-young-and-promise-of-the-real-the-monsanto-years-20150616#ixzz3gkIlI7jm
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
FOSSIL FUELS INDUSTRY, FRACKING
What's Killing the Babies of Vernal, Utah?
A fracking boomtown, a spike in
stillborn deaths and a gusher of unanswered questions http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/fracking-whats-killing-the-babies-of-vernal-utah-20150622?page=12
BY PAUL SOLOTAROFF . Rolling Stone, June 22, 2015, July 2, 2015
BY PAUL SOLOTAROFF . Rolling Stone, June 22, 2015, July 2, 2015
The vice president sat down with
supplicants from the fossil-fuel sector and gold-star donors to his campaign.
For months, he or his small staff met in secret with the likes of James Rouse,
the then-vice president of Exxon Mobil Corp.; Enron's Kenneth Lay; Red Cavaney,
the then-president of the American Petroleum Institute; and dozens of lobbyists
and sen-ior executives from the coal, mining, electric and nuclear sectors.
What Cheney sent the president, four months later, was a policy essentially
written by the barons themselves: a massive expansion of domestic drilling on
federally owned lands; tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies to Big
Oil; and wholesale exemptions to oil-and-gas firms from environmental laws and
oversight. In essence, Cheney's program turned the Department of the Interior
into a boiler-room broker for Big Oil, and undercut the power of the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Cheney's plan was such a
transparent coup for Big Oil that it took four years, two elections and the
Republican capture of both houses of Congress to make it to Bush's desk as
legislation. Along the way, the bill gained a crucial addendum, known today as
the "Halliburton loophole": a carte-blanche exemption from the Safe
Drinking Water Act for an emergent technique called fracking. A form of
extraction dating back to the Civil War, when miners used nitroglycerin to blow
holes in oil-soaked caves (a subsequent version, in the 1960s, used
subterranean nukes to fracture rock), fracking has since evolved into a brute
but nimble method for blasting oil and gas deposits that couldn't be recovered
by conventional derricks, at least not at a rate that made them profitable.
The process, perfected and marketed
by Halliburton, shoots huge amounts of fluid at very high pressure down a mile
or more of pipe to break the rock. That fluid, a trademarked secret called
"slickwater" that has toxic solvents, is mixed with a million gallons
of water, roughly a fifth of which come barreling back as wastewater. It's a
desperately dirty job, marked by horrors of all kinds: blowouts of oil wells
near houses and farms; badly managed gas wells flaring uncapped methane, one of
the planet's most climate-wrecking pollutants.
Then there's pollution of the
eight-wheeled sort: untold truck trips to service each fracking site. Per a
recent report from Colorado, it takes 1,400 truck trips just to frack a well
— and many hundreds more to haul the wastewater away and dump it into
evaporation ponds. That's a lot of diesel soot per cubic foot of gas, all in
the name of a "cleaner-burning" fuel, which is how the industry is
labeling natural gas. MORE http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/fracking-whats-killing-the-babies-of-vernal-utah-20150622?page=12
THE RACE FOR WHAT'S
LEFT
The Global Scramble for the World's
Last Resources
Michael
T. Klare. Picador, Macmillan, 2012.
"As Michael Klare
makes clear in this powerful book, the heads of our corporate empires have
decided to rip apart the planet in one last burst of profiteering. If you want
to understand the next decade, I fear you better read this book."---Bill
McKibben, author of Eaarth
The world is facing an
unprecedented crisis of resource depletion---a crisis that encompasses
shortages of oil and coal, copper and cobalt, water and arable land. With all
of the Earth’s accessible areas already being exploited, the desperate hunt for
supplies has now reached the final frontiers. The
Race for What’s Lefttakes us from the Arctic to war zones to deep ocean
floors, from a Russian submarine planting the country’s flag under the North
Pole to the large-scale buying up of African farmland by Saudi Arabia and other
food-scarce nations. With resource extraction growing more difficult, the
environmental risks are becoming increasingly severe---and the intense search
for dwindling supplies is igniting new conflicts and territorial disputes. The
only way out, Michael T. Klare argues, is to alter our consumption patterns altogether,
a crucial task that will be the greatest challenge of the coming century.
CONNECT WITH THE AUTHOR
OFFICIAL
SITES
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Driven by Depletion In 1971, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesino Cantarell encountered an annoying problem while plying his trade off theYucatán Peninsula :
clots of oil, apparently seeping from underground seams in the Bay of Campeche
Driven by Depletion In 1971, a Mexican fisherman named Rudesino Cantarell encountered an annoying problem while plying his trade off the
MEDIA
Watch
MORE
MEDIA Access more related media on the web
REVIEWS
Praise for The Race for What's Left
"A
first-rate, well-researched wake-up call."---The Christian Science
Monitor
"Outstanding…Exhaustively
researched, beautifully written, and convincingly argued."---The
Huffington Post
"Stunning."---Rolling
Stone
The Master Switch: The
Rise and Fall of Information Empire by Tim Wu.
It is
easy to forget that every development in the history of the American
information industry — from the telephone to radio to film — once existed in an
open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as
the Internet
does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist
or cartel. In this pathbreaking book,
Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate. Could the Web — the entire flow of American
information — come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of “the
master switch”? Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today’s great information
powers — Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T — Wu uncovers a
time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets
empire. He shows how a battle royal for the Internet’s future is brewing, and
this is one war we dare not tune out. “Fascinating, balanced, and rigorous—a
tour de force.” — The New York Boston
[See newsletters on democracy.]
Corporate Tax Breaks: How
Congress Rigs the Rules
|
|
 Robert Borosage, Op-Ed,
NationofChange, April 29, 2014: This
week, the |
Conservative Group ALEC Trains Sights on City and Local
Government
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK, Reader Reported News, March 8, 2014
Pilkington reports: "The rightwing group Alec is preparing to launch a new nationwide network that will seek to replicate its current influence within state legislatures in city councils and municipalities."
READ MORE
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK, Reader Reported News, March 8, 2014
Pilkington reports: "The rightwing group Alec is preparing to launch a new nationwide network that will seek to replicate its current influence within state legislatures in city councils and municipalities."
READ MORE
It’s difficult to separate reporting
from exposure from exposé from criticism, but here we turn to articles more
explicitly on the attack for change.
RESISTANCE: STOPPING HARM
REGULATING
AND TRANSFORMING CORPORATIONS FOR THE PUBLIC AND PLANETARY GOOD
STRUGGLE TO
TRANSFORM US CORPORATE STATE FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE FOR ALL
OBAMA CLOSE TAX LOOPHOLES
 |
|||
|
Dear
Dick,
This
week, while the rest of us dutifully sat down to pay our fair share in taxes,
some of the most profitable corporations in the country avoided paying
billions by exploiting complicated corporate tax loopholes.
Luckily,
there is some hope. President Obama can close some of the most egregious
loopholes through executive action—without the approval of Congress.
In
1952, the corporate income tax accounted for about 32 percent of all federal
tax revenue. Today, despite record-breaking profits, corporate taxes bring in
just 11 percent.
Meanwhile,
some members of Congress are trying to convince us that we need cuts to
Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and other programs that millions of
Americans rely on.
All the
best,
Sarah Arnold  |
|||
CEO
pay revealed, WRITE SEC
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||
|
James,
After years of
delays, the SEC has just voted to enact a
potentially game-changing provision of the Dodd-Frank Act on CEO compensation,
and corporate America
The new
provision requires corporations to disclose the amount their CEOs make compared
to the salary of the median worker. Corporate actors are shocked because the
rule is surprisingly strong -- it doesn't allow many of the usual
gimmicks that corporations use to skew data. This new rule could set off a
revolution at Walmart and other companies that are getting rich off of
underpaid staff.
The US
Chamber of Commerce and other big business organizations are frightened, and
are fighting back, pressuring the SEC to change its mind during a sixty-day
comment period going on now. Sign our petition to the SEC today to ensure that
your voice is heard, and the SEC makes the right call on corporate disclosure.
This data is
valuable for investors, as it helps them determine which companies are
dangerously overloaded at the top. The new disclosure will create downward
pressure in the industry by rewarding companies with more reasonable salary
hierarchies. It will also get workers talking, and put overpaid executives in
the spotlight. This could be a game-changer for out-of-control
inequality. Help us ensure that the provision stays in place,
to stop the wild greed at the top of the largest companies in the US
Unsurprisingly,
corporate lobbyists are doing everything they can to stop these new rules, and if
it looks like the public isn't paying attention, the SEC might just give in and
water down its disclosure requirements. We can't let them get
away with that. Let's flood the SEC with comments demanding the strongest
possible rules for holding CEOs accountable to their investors and the public.
We know regulatory agencies speak up when the SumOfUs community speaks -- the
Federal Communications Commission just cited our comments in its decision
making it cheaper for incarcerated people to call their families.
Thanks for all you do,
Claiborne, Taren, and the team at SumOfUs.org
TruthOut: Federal Regulators Finally "Mind the Gap", 22 September, 2013SumOfUs is a world-wide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy.
Claiborne, Taren, and the team at SumOfUs.org
TruthOut: Federal Regulators Finally "Mind the Gap", 22 September, 2013SumOfUs is a world-wide movement of people like you, working together to hold corporations accountable for their actions and forge a new, sustainable path for our global economy.
|
|
||
|
Posted: 04 Nov
2013 12:25 PM PST
That’s
what the new rules being smuggled into trade agreements are delivering.
By
George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 5th November 2013
Remember
that referendum about whether we should create a single market with the
The
purpose of the Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership
is to remove the regulatory differences between the
The mechanism is called investor-state
dispute settlement. It’s already being used in many parts of the world to
kill regulations protecting people and the living planet.
The
Australian government, after massive debates in and out of parliament,
decided that cigarettes should be sold in plain packets, marked only with
shocking health warnings. The decision was validated by the Australian
supreme court. But, using a trade agreement Australia struck with Hong Kong,
the tobacco company Philip Morris has asked an offshore tribunal to award it
a vast sum in compensation for the loss of what it calls its intellectual
property(3).
During
its financial crisis, and in response to public anger over rocketing charges,
In
In
These
companies (and hundreds of others) are using the investor-state dispute rules
embedded in trade treaties signed by the countries they are suing. The rules
are enforced by panels which have none of the safeguards we expect in our own
courts(7,8). The hearings are held in secret. The judges are corporate
lawyers, many of whom work for corporations of the kind whose cases they
hear. Citizens and communities affected by their decisions have no legal
standing. There is no right of appeal on the merits of the case. Yet they can
overthrow the sovereignty of parliaments and the rulings of supreme courts.
You
don’t believe it? Here’s what one of the judges on these tribunals says about
his work. “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never
ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment
arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power
to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the
government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations
emanating from parliament.”(9)
There
are no corresponding rights for citizens. We can’t use these tribunals to
demand better protections from corporate greed. As the Democracy Centre says,
this is “a privatised justice system for global corporations.”(10)
Even
if these suits don’t succeed, they can exert a powerful chilling effect on
legislation. One Canadian government official, speaking about the rules
introduced by the North American Free Trade Agreement, remarked, “I’ve seen
the letters from the
This
is the system to which we will be subject if the transatlantic treaty goes
ahead. The
The
Commission justifies this policy by claiming that domestic courts don’t offer
corporations sufficient protection because they “might be biased or lack
independence.”(12) Which courts is it talking about? Those of the
Investor-state
rules could be used to smash any attempt to save the NHS from corporate
control, to re-regulate the banks, to curb the greed of the energy companies,
to renationalise the railways, to leave fossil fuels in the ground. These
rules shut down democratic alternatives. They outlaw left-wing politics.
This
is why there has been no attempt by our government to inform us about this
monstrous assault on democracy, let alone consult us. This is why the
Conservatives who huff and puff about sovereignty are silent. Wake up people,
we’re being shafted.
References:
|
|||
Rise Up or Die
|
|
|
|
|
May 19, 2013
 |
|
Illustration by Mr. Fish
|
|
|
By Chris Hedges
Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from
the poorest pockets of the United
States
What has taken place in these sacrifice zones—in postindustrial
cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West
Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations
where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation
worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often
endure conditions that replicate slavery—is now happening to much of the rest
of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.
Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of
information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose
our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their
wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other
independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic
Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of
piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic
institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.
The Department of Justice seizure of two months of records of phone
calls to and from editors and reporters at The Associated Press is the latest
in a series of dramatic assaults against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is
part of an effort to hunt down the government official or officials who leaked
information to the AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet.
Information concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New
York , Washington , D.C., and Hartford , Conn.
Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state’s
broader efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the
state’s Newspeak, and hide from public view the inner
workings, lies and crimes of empire. The person or persons who provided the
classified information to the AP will, if arrested, mostly likely be prosecuted
under the Espionage Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in
1917 to silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office
in 2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the first
time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The
Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama administration against
government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.
The government’s fierce persecution of the press—an attack
pressed by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against
WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy
Hammond—dovetails with the government’s use of the 2001 Authorization for Use
of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S. citizens; of the FISA
Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution was
once illegal—the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of
U.S. citizens; and of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act,
which permits the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip
them of due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures,
taken together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.
A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have
everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a
vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is
one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and
regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia. MORE
Rise Up or Die - Truthdig
Rise Up or Die - Truthdig
The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. A collection of Truthdig Columns by Chris Hedges. https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781568586403?aff=Truthdig Keep up with Chris Hedges’ latest columns, interviews, tour
dates and more atwww.truthdig.com/chris_hed
FOCUS: Ralph Nader | What a Destructive Wall
Street Owes Young Americans
Ralph Nader, The Nader Page , Reader Supported News, March 14, 2014
Nader writes: "Wall Street's big banks and their financial networks that collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008-2009, were saved with huge bailouts by the taxpayers, but these Wall Street Gamblers are still paid huge money and are again creeping toward reckless misbehavior."
READ MORE
Ralph Nader, The Nader Page , Reader Supported News, March 14, 2014
Nader writes: "Wall Street's big banks and their financial networks that collapsed the U.S. economy in 2008-2009, were saved with huge bailouts by the taxpayers, but these Wall Street Gamblers are still paid huge money and are again creeping toward reckless misbehavior."
READ MORE
Evening News Ignores Supreme Court
Decision That Protects Corporate Immunity By
Sergio Munoz, Media Matters for America, 07 July 13. 
vening cable and network news have almost
completely ignored the Supreme Court's sweeping decision in American
Express v. Italian Colors, a 5-3 decision that further privatizes
and restricts access to justice for everyday Americans by allowing corporations
to immunize themselves from judicial review.
Despite the fact that American Express was a highly contentious pro-business opinion by the conservative bloc of the
Supreme Court - even by their extremely corporate-friendly standards - a Media
Matters search of
Nexis transcripts reveals that with the
exception of one brief non-primetime mention on PBS, not one cable or network
evening news show addressed the decision.
Traditional contract law has long held that certain
unconscionable agreements are unenforceable. Contractual clauses are
traditionally voided if they eliminate victims' ability to enforce their
statutory rights, making Justice Antonin Scalia's American
Express opinion to
the contrary "a betrayal of our precedents, and
of federal statutes like the antitrust laws," according to
Justice Elena Kagan's scathing dissent.
In this case, American Express used its monopoly
powers over a group of
small business owners to force them to accept exorbitant credit card fees in a
seemingly blatant violation of antitrust statutes. When these small businesses
grouped together to pursue a class action protecting their consumer rights,
American Express pointed to a clause in the card agreement that not only
blocked access to the courts in favor of forced arbitration, it also prohibited
plaintiffs from joining together in this mandatory forum.
But because of the high cost of bringing actions against this
well-defended corporation, individual claims are financially prohibitive,
leaving the small businesses without "effective vindication" of their
federal rights under antitrust law. Not only are these mandatory arbitration
clauses forcing victims of corporate abuse to forego the courts in favor of
privatized (and confidential) justice, they are barred from making it remotely
affordable. From Justice Kagan's dissent:
Here is the nutshell version of this case, unfortunately
obscured in the Court's decision. The owner of a small restaurant (Italian
Colors) thinks that American Express (Amex) has used its monopoly power to
force merchants to accept a form contract violating the antitrust laws. The
restaurateur wants to challenge the allegedly unlawful provision (imposing a
tying arrangement), but the same contract's arbitration clause prevents him
from doing so. That term imposes a variety of procedural bars that would make
pursuit of the antitrust claim a fool's errand. So if the arbitration clause is
enforceable, Amex has insulated itself from antitrust liability - even if it
has in fact violated the law. The monopolist gets to use its monopoly power to
insist on a contract effectively depriving its victims of all legal recourse.
And here is the nutshell version of today's opinion, admirably
flaunted rather than camouflaged: Too darn bad.
Unfortunately, American Express is yet another example of the
conservative justices' extreme and continued favorability toward corporate
interests, especially those pushed by the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, and utter hostility toward class action lawsuits and the
consumers and workers who bring them. And these decisions - AT&T v. Concepcion, Comcast v. Behrend, Wal-Mart v. Dukes - are piling up at an alarming rate. MORE
https://www.schwartzreport.net/evening-news-ignores-supreme-court-decision-that-protects-corporate-immunity/
[Thanks to David Druding
for this and many other postings about US capitalism.
|
My credit
cards already got cut up when these money handlers all voluntarily {illegally)
refused to facilitate $ transfers of litigation donation funds for WikiLeak's
Julian Assange and Bradley Manning as they attempted to reveal the truth about
US military & foreign policy to the US public & the world. Silencing
the truth and surveillance are now a big lucrative biz in the US
This media ignored decision by the corp shill majority on the Supreme Court will hopefully see a bunch more cut into pieces in our plastic recycle bins.]
This media ignored decision by the corp shill majority on the Supreme Court will hopefully see a bunch more cut into pieces in our plastic recycle bins.]
|
|
From The Nation
Dear J R,
Ralph
Nader has
fought for over fifty years against the reckless influence of corporations
and their government patrons on our society. In his new book Unstoppable, he explores the
emerging political alignment of the Left and the Right in embryonic
partnership against converging corporate-government tyranny.
Large segments from the
progressive, conservative, and libertarian political camps find themselves
aligned in opposition to the destruction of civil liberties, the corporate
welfare state, the relentless perpetuation of
Order the book online or
buy it at any good bookstore and find out why Cornel West says
that “Ralph Nader’s timely book once again makes him prescient in his
insights about American politics. His against-the-grain prediction of a
Left-Right alliance is not just a hope, but it is grounded in emerging
evidence.”
All the best,
Peter Ro
|
|
Ignoring
Poverty in the U.S : The Corporate Takeover of Public Education, P. L.
Thomas, Furman University, 2012. Paperback 978-1-61735-783-1 $45.99. Hardcover
978-1-61735-784-8 $85.99. eBook 978-1-61735-785-5 $50
Ignoring Poverty in the
U.S.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Education examines the divide
between a commitment to public education and our cultural
myths and more powerful commitment to consumerism and corporate America. The book addresses poverty in the context of the following: the historical and
conflicting purposes in public education—how schools became positivistic/behavioral in our quest to produce workers for industry; the accountability era—how A Nation at Risk through NCLB have served corporate interest in dismantling public education and dissolving teachers unions; the media and misinformation about education; charter schools as political/corporate compromise masking poverty; demonizing schools and scapegoating teachers—from misusing the SAT to VAM evaluations of teachers; rethinking the purpose of schools—shifting from schools as social saviors to addressing poverty so that public education can fulfill its purpose of empowering everyone in a democracy; and reframing how we view people living in poverty—rejecting deficit views of people living in poverty and students struggling in school under the weight of lives in poverty.
myths and more powerful commitment to consumerism and corporate America. The book addresses poverty in the context of the following: the historical and
conflicting purposes in public education—how schools became positivistic/behavioral in our quest to produce workers for industry; the accountability era—how A Nation at Risk through NCLB have served corporate interest in dismantling public education and dissolving teachers unions; the media and misinformation about education; charter schools as political/corporate compromise masking poverty; demonizing schools and scapegoating teachers—from misusing the SAT to VAM evaluations of teachers; rethinking the purpose of schools—shifting from schools as social saviors to addressing poverty so that public education can fulfill its purpose of empowering everyone in a democracy; and reframing how we view people living in poverty—rejecting deficit views of people living in poverty and students struggling in school under the weight of lives in poverty.
This work is intended to
confront the growing misinformation about the interplay among poverty, public
schools, and what schools can accomplish while
political and corporate leadership push agendas aimed at replacing public education with alternatives such as charter schools. The audience for the publication includes educators, educational reformers, politicians, and any member of the wider public interested in public education.
political and corporate leadership push agendas aimed at replacing public education with alternatives such as charter schools. The audience for the publication includes educators, educational reformers, politicians, and any member of the wider public interested in public education.
“The Benefit
Corporation The Unlikely Hero of a Sustainable Economy? “
BY • 22
APRIL 2014 The Humanist, May-June 2014
Imagine, if you will, a
paradigm shift to a sustainable global economic system in which all
corporations act as responsible global citizens. The unlikely hero at the
center of this transformation? It’s the newest evolutionary form of a business
firm—the benefit corporation.
The prevailing belief that
corporations exist solely to maximize profit for shareholders is the single
biggest impediment to creating a sustainable economic system. In the current
paradigm, it is morally acceptable for corporations to externalize as many of
the negative consequences of their behavior on society and the environment as
is legally permissible. Corporations have no inherent social and environmental
conscience.
Think British Petroleum,
which made a series of cost-cutting decisions with respect to its Deepwater
Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico . In 2010
such decisions caused the largest accidental oil spill in the history of the
petroleum industry. Eleven people died in the accident and the Gulf of Mexico region suffered billions of dollars of
environmental and property damage. British Petroleum settled federal criminal
charges against it by pleading guilty to eleven counts of manslaughter, two
misdemeanors, and a felony count of lying to Congress. Yet profit maximization
remains the justification for corporate behavior and the default corporate
conscience in the entire global economic system.
Intuitively, we all know
there’s something terribly wrong with this picture. The lack of a conscience
makes the corporation prone to periodic outbursts of behavior that could be
characterized as sociopathic. Antitrust laws, labor laws, environmental laws,
and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 are all external attempts by society to
regulate corporate conduct and create ethical standards of corporate behavior.
With profit maximization normalized as their moral compass and default
conscience, corporations are perversely incentivized to increase profits in
violation of natural law principles.
Many U.S. corporations, for example, have felt
compelled to maximize profit for shareholders and have moved manufacturing
offshore to China United States U.S. standards, posing known health risks to people
and repeating the same environmental mistakes we made in the United States
What’s alarming is that
corporations have begun to transcend the sovereignty of the nation-states that
charter them by operating above the law. Multinationals create byzantine networks
of foreign subsidiaries that leverage favorable tax codes and international tax
treaties to maximize profit by minimizing corporate taxes. All of these
strategies are perfectly legal ways of avoiding taxes that often end up harming
society. Like most multinationals, Apple Inc. uses such laws to minimize the
corporate tax it pays. Headquartered in California ,
Apple has accumulated $158.8 billion in cash while the State of California
How did our global
economic system become so overrun by corporations that have no social or
environmental conscience?
One reason is that we’re
still using business methods that were designed for commerce in the seventeenth
century. The corporation was primarily designed as an agent to conquer and
exploit foreign markets for the crown. The oldest corporation in North America,
the Hudson ’s Bay Company, which received
its charter from King Charles II of England Hudson ’s Bay
Company controlled 15 percent of the landmass of North
America .
The king, however, put the
corporations on a short leash because he didn’t trust the people operating
them. Since these early corporations were largely composed of mercenary forces,
the last thing the king wanted was to create a rival political or economic
power. The king chartered corporations for his own plans, and if they
misbehaved he could simply revoke the charter or refuse to renew it. Because he
was the ultimate authority, there was no need for the corporation to have a
social or environmental conscience. Society and the environment needed no
protection because natives in these far-off markets were considered inferior
heathens and, under the prevailing Christian ethos, man was supposed to
exercise dominion over nature and the environment.
We got rid of the king in
the American Revolution but his corporation slipped unnoticed into the new
nation. The truth is that “We the People” never answered the fundamental
philosophical question: what should the rights and moral responsibilities of
our corporations be? Instead, the chartering function flowed from the king to
state legislatures. In the early years of the Republic, it took an act of
legislation to charter a corporation. It was usually chartered for a
limited public purpose, such as building and running a canal, and for a limited
term of years.
In 1811, the United States was outraged by the high cost of
cotton products imported from Great
Britain New York
The first antitrust law,
the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, for example, was adopted in response to the
emergence of powerful railroad and manufacturing conglomerates that were
perceived to have excessive economic power. In the words of Senator John
Sherman (R-OH), “if we will not endure a king as a political power we should
not endure a king over the production, transportation, or sale of the
necessities of life.”
Naturally, feudal
institutions beget feudal behavior. Corporate leaders of today often act like
feudal kings, treating the corporations as agents of their personal empires.
AIG, for example, paid its executives $165 million in bonuses six months after
receiving a $182 billion bailout from the U.S.
In short, there is a
design flaw in the corporation that makes its present form unsuitable for life
in a massively interdependent world with finite resources. Corporations lack a
social and environmental conscience by design. Endowed with the power of
immortality, corporations aren’t required to act with consideration for the
societies that charter them and the planet that ultimately sustains them. Our
courts have endowed corporations with many of the rights of citizens without
requiring a corresponding moral responsibility appropriate to their size and
greater power to adversely affect society and the environment.
We, the people, are waking
up and remembering that the ultimate authority to charter corporations and
determine the scope of their responsibility lies with us. Occupy Wall Street
and its “we are the 99 percent” refrain helped remind us that we, the people,
have the ultimate sovereignty over corporations. We now understand that we
cannot create a sustainable economic system without the participation of our
largest collective life forms, the corporations. The guiding principle of
profit maximization must be expanded to include the provision of a material
positive impact on society and the environment. External regulations are no
substitute for an internal moral compass that not only protects shareholders
but also people and the planet.
Happily, the corporation
is on its own hero’s journey and is evolving to acquire a conscience. Indeed, a
global movement is afoot to correct the corporation’s fundamental design flaw
in order to endow it with the legal architecture that activates an internal
social and environmental conscience. Twenty states, including California ,
New York , and Delaware
Benefit corporations
generally expand the fiduciary duties of directors to consider the effects of
corporate behavior on all of a corporation’s stakeholders, such as employees,
vendors and suppliers, the communities in which it does business, the
environment, and its shareholders. Benefit corporations generally also require
transparency and accountability to shareholders for meeting the public purpose.
California
Since the first benefit
corporation law was passed in 2010, approximately 500 corporations in the United States , including the California-based
outdoor clothing company Patagonia , have
become benefit corporations. And the movement among companies to have their
social and environmental impact assessed against third-party standards is
growing. Today 15,000 businesses have taken B Lab’s Certified B Corporation
assessment and 990 businesses in thirty-two countries have become Certified B
Corporations. British Columbia passed a law
enabling the formation of community contribution companies in July 2013, and Chile
The benefit corporation is
the most important development in the field of business law since the advent of
free incorporation and limited liability in 1811. These new corporate laws
represent a massive shift in our collective consciousness about business, from
a narrow focus on profits to triple bottom-line orientation—people, profit, and
planet. Impact investing, corporate social responsibility, and movements like
Conscious Capitalism are all part of this global shift in consciousness, which
begins to recognize that we are all part of one planet and one human family.
The benefit corporation will help businesses shift from an egocentric focus on
profits to include consideration of the “we” and the “one.”
What kind of a world would
we live in if every corporation optimized the effect of its behavior on society
and the environment while still making a profit? B Lab, a non-profit
headquartered in Wayne , Pennsylvania
We envision a new sector
of the economy, which harnesses the power of private enterprise to create
public benefit. This sector is comprised of a new type of corporation, the B
Corporation, which is purpose-driven and creates benefit for all stakeholders,
not just shareholders.
As members of this
emerging economy and as entrepreneurs and investors in B Corporations, We hold
these truths to be self-evident:
That we must be the change
we seek in the world.
That business ought to be
conducted as if people and place mattered.
That through their
products, practices, and profits, businesses should aspire to do no harm and
benefit all.
To do so requires that we
act with the understanding that we are each dependent upon another and thus
responsible for each other and future generations.
What can you do as an
individual? Increasingly, you’ll have a choice as to which economy you would
like to be a part of—the old economy dominated by corporations, whose sole
purpose is to maximize profit for shareholders, or the emerging economy in
which corporations exist to optimize good and profit. You can hold corporations
accountable by voting with your pocketbook to do business with benefit
corporations and Certified B Corporations who are serious about sustainability.
Encourage your favorite companies to become benefit corporations and measure
their provision of a material positive impact on society and the environment
against third-party standards such as B Lab’s. With your actions, you can help
create a sustainable economic system.
John Montgomery is a
corporate attorney, entrepreneur, leadership consultant, author, and speaker.
He is the founder of Montgomery & Hanson, LLP, a corporate law firm in Silicon Valley and author of Great From the Start: How
Conscious Corporations Attract Success. He currently advises
corporations on how to transform themselves into businesses that not only
optimize profit but also provide a material positive impact on society and the
environment.
DISCLOSURE
MOVEMENT TO END SECRET POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING
CEOs Play Hide and Seek by Jim
Hightower. The Progressive (July 2013).
http://www.progressive.org/sites/default/files/mag/pdfs/theprogressive_web_july_2013.pdf
How front groups for
corporations and wealthy individuals “pour unlimited sums of corporate cash
into elections without ever disclosing the names of their funders.” --Dick
 |
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||
|
·
|
|
Freedom to Harm
The Lasting Legacy of the Laissez Faire
Revival
·
Thomas O. McGarity
How much economic freedom is a good thing?
This book tells the story of how the business community, and the trade associations and think tanks that it created, launched three powerful assaults during the last quarter of the twentieth century on the federal regulatory system and the state civil justice system to accomplish a revival of the laissez faire political economy that dominated Gilded Age America. Although the consequences of these assaults became painfully apparent in a confluence of crises during the early twenty-first century, the patch-and-repair fixes that Congress and the Obama administration put into place did little to change the underlying laissez faire ideology and practice that continues to dominate the American political economy. In anticipation of the next confluence of crises, Thomas McGarity offers suggestions for more comprehensive governmental protections for consumers, workers, and the environment.
Thomas O. McGarity holds
the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law at the
|
Rev. Public Citizen
News (May-June 2013). Book will
help public understand that regulation of business is good for the public. –Dick
CORPORATIONS VERSUS THE PEOPLE: BLAME THE GOVERNMENT
This particular cartoon is about
6 rows down.
 |
Global
Warming News
|
Compiled: November 22, 2013 04:56:01 AM
|
Dot Earth
By ANDREW C.
REVKIN
Who’s most accountable for the vast emissions of greenhouse
gases so far — the companies that extracted the fuels or the citizens using
them?
CORPORATE LYING: SOME
ADVERTISING EXCEEDS CHICANERY
Big Food Companies Want to Call
GMO Foods "Natural"
John Upton, Grist, RSN Dec. 23, 2013 READ MORE
OPPOSING
CORPORATE RIGHT TO SUE GOVERNMENT
“The Global Fight
Against Corporate Rule”
Activists are
challenging rules that grant corporations the right to sue governments.
·
·
A protester holds a sign that
reads in Spanish “No to mining” at a protest against
Over the past several
decades, multinational corporate Goliaths have helped to write and rewrite
hundreds of rules skewing tax, trade, investment and other policies in their
favor. The extraordinary damage these policies have caused has become
increasingly apparent to the communities and governments most directly
affected by them. This, in turn, has strengthened the potential of a movement
that’s emerging to try to reverse the momentum. But
just like David with his slingshot, the local, environmental and government
leaders seeking to revise rules to favor communities and the planet must pick
their battles carefully.
One of the most promising of
these battles takes aim at an egregious set of agreements that allow
corporations to sue national governments. Until three decades ago,
governments could pass laws to protect consumers, workers, health, the
environment and domestic firms with little threat of outside legal challenge
from corporations. All that changed when corporations started acquiring the
“right” to sue governments over actions—including public interest
regulations—that reduce the value of their investments. These rights first
appeared in little-known bilateral investment treaties. Twenty years ago,
corporate lawyers embedded them in the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA). Today, more than 3,000 trade and investment agreements and even some
national investment laws grant foreign investors these powers.
The Obama administration is
attempting to insert similar anti-democratic investor protections in new
trade and investment agreements with countries that border the Pacific and
with the European Union. Hoping to expedite the so-called Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
(TTIP), congressional leaders introduced fast- track trade promotion
legislation on January 9 that would severely limit Congress’s ability to
amend such agreements. The widely anticipated move set off a storm of protest
from unions, environmentalists, liberal members of Congress and others, and
will likely remain a high-profile fight in the coming weeks.
The forces aligned against these
proposed agreements are not alone. Activists across the globe are developing
creative and increasingly effective strategies to push back against investor
assaults on their communities, environment and national sovereignty. An
important front has opened up in
At the very least, these
struggles should give the Obama administration pause as it considers the next
round of trade agreements. But what makes them so strategic—and promising—is
that powerful citizen groups are persuading
governments to take up the challenge. As they do, they are building
momentum in a broad global fight against investor rights.
* * *
Salvadoran
land sits atop a wide belt of gold running down the middle of
The areas affected by gold
mining will remain contaminated for centuries unless the companies are kept
out and forced to pay for costly cleanup. Yet
Over the course of several
trips we have taken in recent years to learn about the local movement against
mining, corn and bean farmers have led us up and down the hills of northern
Miguel and his colleagues
brought us through different parts of the Lempa watershed to show us
pollution from agribusiness, factories, hog farms and gold mining. Along the
way, Miguel, who has become a trained water expert, often paused to test it
for toxins and other substances. We visited the site of Butters’s
As the prices of gold and other
metals skyrocketed after 2000, multinational firms like Pacific Rim rushed to
apply for permits to mine in resource-rich regions like the Salvadoran
Local activism on the proposed
Pacific Rim mine—including cultural work led by Marcelo Rivera and a radio station
run by local youth—spread in Cabañas and across El Salvador. Farmers,
students, people of faith, lawyers and human-rights activists formed the
National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining, and won over politicians and
even the mainstream Catholic church. By 2007, a national poll showed that
more than 62 percent of Salvadorans opposed metals mining. As Miguel Rivera
and others continually stressed to us, the slogan of the Roundtable was “We
can live without gold, but we can’t live without water.”
When the progressive FMLN party
won the presidency in 2009, the newly elected president, Mauricio Funes,
pledged not to issue mining permits during his five-year term, a promise he
has kept. In other words,
·
1
·
2
·
3
·
next ›
·
last »
|
CORPORATE
SECURITY STATE
The
Rise of the American Corporate Security State: Six Reasons to Be Afraid by Beatrice Edwards.
An insightful new book from GAP Executive & International Director
Beatrice Edwards illustrates how
Americans now live in a security state where the government values corporate
rights over its citizens. The Rise of
the American Corporate Security State: Six Reasons to Be Afraid is a call-to-action for anyone who
wants to fight the erosion of our civil liberties.
Edwards draws upon years of experience heading GAP, the nation's leading
whistleblower protection and advocacy organization, to reveal the truth. She is
directly involved with the cases of intelligence
agency insiders William Binney, Tom Drake, John Kiriakou, Edward Snowden and J.
Kirk Wiebe, and financial industry whistleblowers like Citigroup's Richard
Bowen and anonymous AIG insiders. Edwards is uniquely situated to
connect-the-dots and alert the public about the real and present threats to our
democracy.
What are these existing threats?
Edwards' book effectively outlines what Americans should be alarmed about:
- Average
citizens are subject to ever-expanding surveillance and data collection by the government-corporate
complex.
- Control of information by the government-corporate
complex is expanding.
- The separation of powers established
by the Constitution is eroding. Rights guaranteed by
constitutional amendments are becoming irrelevant. Reporting a crime may be a crime, and
informing the public of the truth is treason.
- The government-corporate surveillance
complex is consolidating. What has become a confidential but informal
collaboration now seeks to legalize its special status.
- Financial reforms enacted after the 2008 crisis are
inoperable and ineffective because of inadequate investigations and
intensive corporate lobbying.
- Systemic corruption and a fundamental conflict of
interest are driving us toward the precipice of new economic crises.
Just how did it come to this? Edwards's beautifully written
narrative shows how, after 9/11 created a panic, the intelligence agencies
overreached in instituting surveillance programs that violate Americans'
constitutional rights. Corporations lined up to secure waste-laden government
contracts to sell new technologies that grabbed and shared private customer
data, all while using the bogus threat of a "cyber war" as
justification. This nefarious partnership is exactly why the Justice Department
isn't going after the institutions responsible for the financial collapse of
2008.
Edwards knows all of this from working directly with
whistleblowers who witnessed the wrongdoing firsthand.
As the growing national security state embeds with the corporate
security complex, Edwards outlines how citizens can take their country back by
restoring government transparency and returning privacy controls to personal
information.
You can order the book on Amazon or from book publisher Berrett-Koehler.
Praise for The
Rise of the American Corporate Security
State
Noted opinion leaders and
journalists praise Edwards' book for its valuable contribution to society.
Accolades include:
"Bea Edwards has written a
vital book about the ridiculously cozy relationship between corporate wealth
and government power and how it only seems to be getting worse. It's up to the
rest of us now to do something about it."
– William
Cohan , New York
author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World
"A must-read for those who
love this country and wish to preserve its fast-fading democracy. Edwards is an
extraordinary writer who brilliantly captures the essence of what
whistleblowers such as Snowden have sacrificed their careers and jeopardized
their personal liberties to convey. This book has arrived just in time if – and
only if – those who are moved by it take concerted practical action."
– Daniel Ellsberg,
Pentagon Papers whistleblower and
Director, Freedom of the Press Foundation
Director, Freedom of the Press Foundation
Media Coverage
About the Author
Beatrice Edwards is the Executive
Director of GAP. She works with whistleblowers from government, corporations
and international financial institutions on issues of illegality, abuse, and
corruption. For ten years, she was a contributing columnist to The
Texas Observer, working under the pseudonym "Gabriela
Bocagrande," and she received a Project Censored award in 2002. Currently,
she writes for GAP's inhouse blog and for The Huffington Post about corruption and surveillance
issues.
Edwards holds an M.A. from the University of Texas
and a Ph.D. from American
University Bangkok , Delhi , Paris , Sao Paulo , Moscow , and Cali , as well as around the United States
GAP Protecting Whistleblowers since 1977
Contents
#7 June 10
Background: Greenspan
ALEC’S
Anti-Environment Legislation
Goodman on Bank
of America
Washburn,
Corporate Influence in Education
Compassion
Commodified
Corporate
Foundation of US Imperialism
Reich, Together
We Can
Contents #8
TPP: Corporate
Coup in Pacific
Greedy CEO’s
Taibbi:
Financial Corporations vs. Reform
Hedges
Votes Green
Hedges
Reviews Eggers, Lies of Global Corporate Capitalism
Corporate
Disinformation Campaign Against Climate Truths
Corporations
versus the People: Blame the Government
(cartoon)
Contents #9 May 5, 2013
Pizzigati, The
Rich Don’t Always Win?
Corporate
Accountability International
Cordaro, Christian
Critique
Crawford,
Control of Internet
Levine, Stand
Up Against Corporations
Li Delin,
Latest of 2 Books on Goldman Sachs
END US
CORPORATIONS NEWSLETTER #10
No comments:
Post a Comment